Heather Kelley: Designing Experimental Games

Photo by: Keita TakahashiPlaying online or through a
console in your living room is one way to game, but Heather Kelley, founder of
the game development company Perfect Plum
and co-founder of the experimental game collective Kokoromi, wants you to think bigger. Much bigger.

Kelley has designed avant
garde games ranging from a connect-the-dots
experience wherein players find invisible points located throughout the
room by following sound and visual clues while holding a squeezable wireless
orb device to Sugar, a game
created for the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, Austria, where players perform
synchronized routines as horses and receive scents of leather, grass, and horse
excrement in the process.

“You can’t only think of
a game as something that you play on your TV in your living room,” Kelley
says. “It’s only a phase really. Games before that were not a thing that
you played on your living room television. I’m very interested in what will
happen when games are not quite as obsessed with happening on a screen.”

For Kelley, that means
exploring how games can use senses like smell, human-to-human touch, and social
rules to create new experiences. Currently in residency with the artist
collective Blast Theory in
Brighton, England, Kelley is examining the role that smell plays in gaming and
working on a “smell-based playful sculpture” with the help of a grant.

Get In Media: Perfect Plum’s mission is to focus on
“under-explored aesthetic experiences and sensory interactions.”
Where specifically are you seeing that happen in games?

Heather Kelley: The under-explored is getting smaller and smaller all
the time. The senses that I guess I’m focusing on most right now might be to
some degree touch, although of course touch screens are quite popular, there’s
certainly other kinds of touch like skin-to-skin contact or things like that.
Also proprioception, which is a complicated way of saying the feeling that you
feel inside your body when you are moving so that you can tell if you’re
holding your arm up in the air, you feel that inside in your joints and your
muscles. It’s how you know you’re doing that without looking at it, and then
smell and taste. This year I’m especially focusing on smell.

GIM: What’s coming up next for you?

HK: There are a lot of people that are working these days
with smell as an art form or as an expressive form or as a science. I’m
interested in all of that, but I think the thing I haven’t seen and that I
really want to explore is the interactive capabilities. It’s not only about
“Oh, I take a really tight corner in this racing game and I smell the
burning rubber.” The example I like to use is what if there was a game
where you played a bloodhound and it was a mystery and you actually had to
follow a scent trail or you had to identify something based on the smell of
someone’s perfume and then when you smelled it again, you would know that they
were there? How can we use smell for the emotionally affective possibility, but
also its ability to conjure memory and therefore from the memory conjure
emotions? How can we put a scent into an interaction at the beginning and then
later on use the emotional resonance from the first time you smelled it to
recall it without having to show the same visuals? There are things like that
where I want to know how can we use the possibilities of smell that have not
been explored in the interactive medium.

GIM: What is the technology for incorporating smell [into
a game]? How do you physically do it?

HK: There are a lot of different ways you can do it, but
it’s not a very convenient medium to work with, which is why not too many
people have worked with it before. It really is about a physical-chemical
substance that has to physically interface with receptor cells inside your
nose. How can you create and generate these chemical particles so reliably?
It’s messy and, I wouldn’t say dangerous, but you’re using different chemicals,
so maybe it’s going to spill and it’s going to be a problem. It’ll certainly be
annoying and some people even really have strong negative reactions to smells
or they’re allergic to them or any number of things like that, so the physical
manifestation of it is a huge challenge, but I also want to explore the
possibilities there.

GIM: How close are we to having a console or something at
home that incorporates smell or taste or touch in a way that’s not a touch
screen?

HK: There are a number of technologies that are being
created right now, but it’s not the first time that’s happened. In fact, there
was a big wave of smell technology around 1999 and this current wave doesn’t
seem to have gotten much beyond that point. I think for me, we have to stop
thinking about gaming as only a living room, console-based experience. Yes that
will be there, but that isn’t the only place we need to think about how these
technologies and sensory elements can be used. Games are becoming much more
integrated into everyday, outside of the home experiences or events or
promotions or concerts or just different things like that. Folk games, games in
science museums, games in art exhibits, other kinds of physical entertainment
spaces. The living room delivery thing is only one of the ways it’s going to
happen. I think the other things are probably coming sooner because they’re
easier to accomplish. We can take what we learn from those more embodied and
location-based experiences and apply that to when eventually there are
technologies for delivering sense in the home.

GIM: What technologies are you using for incorporating
different senses into games?

HK: I can maybe talk a bit about things I have done, but
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some projects that I know about that I’m
not personally working on, because there are games that are using things like
haptics [which incorporate the sense of touch through things like motion,
vibrations, electronic pulses, surface textures, and other tactile techniques
into gameplay] or wearables, like wearable technology that have sensors in it
that you can play a game with. There’s a game called Propinquity that you could
look up that uses haptics or that uses accelerometers.

For instance, my collective, Kokoromi, is working on a game for the Sifteo platform, which you may know of. I
think they’re comparing it between a smartphone and a Lego because it’s small
pieces that can detect one another. You can put them together and they can form
a chain if you are sitting putting them next to each other. They have motion
sensors in them so they know if anything gets shaken. They have a pressure sensor;
they know if something is pushed on the screen. It can do any number of things.
We were interested when we found out about this platform to see how far we
could push this.

We’re working on this game.
It’s called A Series of Tubes and it’s trying to use all of these capabilities
of the Sifteo device. Our game is meant to be played without any table
whatsoever with the pieces held in mid-air. We’re using the accelerometer.
We’re using the proximity sensing. We’re using all the different capabilities.
We’re just not default relying on the way things have been done before.

Editor’s Note: Between the time of this interview and publication, Kokoromi’s Sifteo project was canceled. Currently, Kelley is unveiling a game based around the theme “reclaimed” she developed along with a team of multimedia creatives for the PlayARK festival in Cardiff, Wales.

GIM: In your TED Talk, you also talked about how games can
change the way we socially interact with people. I’m thinking specifically
about the hopscotch game you co-created that requires players to give each
other compliments in order to move forward. Would you mind talking about how
you feel like gaming is or can push our social bounds?

HK: This is really important because certainly there’s
plenty of single-player games where it’s you interacting with the content in
the game, but games have always been and continue to be profoundly able to
shape human interaction with one another. In fact, that’s kind of what they’re
about. The rules are defining this magic circle in which everyone is agreeing
to this alternate reality, if you will, that consists of the way the game works
and the game’s rules. They always have that capability and it’s interesting to
find ways to use that capability to create different relationships or different
behaviors of people toward one another. I think that’s one of game’s incredible
strengths, but also one of the dangers, I think, because when you get into
something like gameification, you’re talking about using those powers of
shaping human behavior to do things that may be against the person’s best interest.

GIM: For students who want to follow in your career
footsteps, what do you recommend they do?

HK: I think, and this is not my original advice, but I
certainly found myself nodding vigorously when I heard it, that game designers
can’t only come from games. You can’t feed yourself a steady diet of nothing
but games and take the medium forward from that basis. You have to have an
interest and experience in what’s going on with games, but then also have
experience in other media like film and music and things like that, but also
just life in general. I don’t know, gardening or tall ship sailing or horse
riding. If you wanted to follow in my virtual dream footsteps, you’d study tall
ship sailing and horse riding and gardening of carnivorous plants, and then
you’d become a game designer.